Howard Dean

  Sometimes when a bomb goes off one oughta ask: who planted it? In the case of the Daschle debacle, no one is asking why his relationship with Leo Hindery suddenly became so problematic and why the Left didn't go to the mattresses for the man who was well positioned --warts and all-- to nationalize American health care.   These things never happen by accident. Someone fed the press and flogged the story. Someone who wanted Daschle to go down hard. And trust me, the Republicans haven't planted a story this good in the DC press in years.   Notice Daschle was sailing towards confirmation until all these details about his links to Leo Hindery came out....beyond just the tax lapses.  

Well, answer this question then. Who in the Democrat Party would be the most motivated to screw Leo Hindery to the wall and take his buddies along with him?

Answer: Someone who was on the receiving end of attack ads paid for by Hindery in a prior campaign, perhaps?

  I notice current Obama flack Robert Gibbs was the front man for this corporate hit group; so now a guy who made a living calling Howard Dean a pinko is explaining why Obama is peachy keen closing down Gitmo. And, of course, Gibbs was the prime cheerleader for Daschle's nomination.  (It's a small world, after all) 

 If Howard Dean and his buddies pulled off this covert op, well, they;ve moved up a notch in my book.   Frankly, I didn't think this white bread WASP had a streak of "Irish Alzheimers"...when a politician gets so old he forgets everything except the grudges. (this disease, BTW ,is why I blog under a pseudonym; too many CT Dems from the 80's and 90's have used my surname as an expletive).

 Even victory doesn't bind up all wounds. The spoils are always worth fighting over.  Watch more battles between the "real Left" and the "corporate Left" akin to the split between the "Official IRA" and the "Provisional IRA".

Republicans have come down with Howard Dean Envy. A great summary of Dean revisionism from the left can be found at Ari Berman's piece in The Nation singing the praises of the outgoing DNC Chairman, who laid the groundwork for the Obama campaign with his 50 State Strategy. Cahnman blogging in this space picks up the theme. And numerous candidates for RNC Chairman have offered up their own version of the 50 State Strategy.

I am going to dissent on this one. I've consciously avoided any references to a 50 State Strategy because I think a cookie-cutter state-by-state approach is secondary to building up good candidates and using technology and open grassroots platforms to mass-empower all Republican activists everywhere with one fell swoop (as opposed to 50). New technologies are a tool for nationalizing elections and at the same time empowering individuals to act on the hyper-local level. Less important are the traditional middle-men -- and this applies to state and local parties, and to some extent, the RNC.

Dean the candidate was transformative. He showed that one could not only augment but supplant a traditional political organization using online tools. This lesson has since been learned by the likes of Ron Paul... and by the President-elect of the United States.

Dean the chairman has been less so. To be sure, the 50 State Strategy was a marked departure from the committee's traditional DC-centric focus, as evidenced by Rahm Emanuel's fierce resistance to Dean doing long-term organizing in places like Alaska and Mississippi as opposed to winning targeted 2006 races.

The Nation has a profile on Howard Dean that's well worth reading.

Money Graf:

A few months later the state chairs asked Dean and the other contenders for DNC chair to give $200,000 a year to each state party. Dean enthusiastically embraced and enlarged the plan en route to easily winning the DNC race and gave every state the resources to hire at least three or four organizers and access to a high-tech database of voters, which became the twin cornerstones of the fifty-state strategy. Under Dean, battlegrounds like Ohio still took priority, but every state got something. That might not sound like much, but it was practically a revolution within the Democratic Party, which tended to view the DNC as a PR agency and ATM for Congress and/or the White House. "We had a great building and no debt," Dean says, referring to the work of his predecessor, the high-flying Clintonite Terry McAuliffe. "But there was essentially no technological infrastructure and no political infrastructure of any worth." The states, by and large, had been left to fend for themselves.

As someone who was skeptical about Dean, I'm surprised how successful he's been.  That said, there are certain lessons I think we need to learn from this moving forward:

1) COMPETE EVERYWHERE - This is the most important lesson we need to internalize.  That's why I wrote my controversial blog post about San Francisco.  Woody Allen says 80% of success is showing up and he's largely right.  Where Dean dispatched organizers (sidenote: I still HATE that term; any alternatives?) to Indiana and Alaska, we should dispatch organizers to Maine and Wisconsin with the goal of electing Republicans at the state and local level while hoping to pick up the occasional House or Senate seat.

It's important to physically show up and ask people for their vote.  I have a family member who is a VERY Conservative Republican Redneck Bitter Clinger who lives in John Murtha's district.  This guy votes the straight Republican ticket EXCEPT for John Murtha.  Why does he vote for Murtha?  He votes for Murtha because every 6-8 months Murtha shows up at the bar he hangs out at and talks to him about the state of world affairs and the guy just likes Murtha personally.  If John Murtha can do this, why can't we pick off some Dems doing roughly the same thing?

In 2009, there will be a Governor's race in New Jersey.  With the economy tanking, Governor John Corzine wil eventually raise taxes.  Unfortunately for him, New Jersey has a history of tax revolts.  This gives us an opportunity, but we have to start organizing for it now.

I live in Austin, TX.  We have a House seat here I'm convinced is winnable.  I'll address this in more detail later.

2) Nuts can still do Nuts and Bolts - It wasn't just The Scream.  As anyone who remembers his 2004 Presidential campaign can attest, Dean frequently made colorful remarks.  As DNC chair, that didn't matter.  Dean's responsiblity was strictly electoral, he didn't have any role in shaping public policy.

On our side, that means reaching out to the Ron Paul crowd.  They've shown that they have a knack for online politics and they've been successful.  While I find their views on Foreign Policy masochistic, I still agree with them on more issues than not.  Why not bring them aboard in a more systematic way?

3) Apostates are OK; Grandstanding RINO's are not - While the article doesn't touch on this, another major factor in the Democrat rise was that they nominated much more conservative candidates.  Democrats were willing to tolerate a few ideological apostates in order to win; they just won't tolereate those members grandstanding against their own party.  We should take the same approach.

Thoughts/Suggestions?!?

Howard Dean, 2008:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Monday that he’s looking forward to one party controlling all aspects of government, despite GOP charges that it would be a disastrous Nov. 4 outcome.  “Republicans had a chance to rule. They failed miserably. I think it’s time to give the other party a chance,” Dean said on MSNBC.

Howard Dean, 2005:

We need more than one party in charge. And the vote on Tuesday is going to be critical to decide whether American democracy still allows those of us who didn't vote for the president to have any say in running the country whatsoever.
[...]
Someday, the Democrats will be back in charge again. Do we want a Democratic Party that's in charge of everything? Well, you know, I suppose it's my job to say yes. But the truth is, as an American, it's better when parties share power. It's better when even those people who didn't win the election have something to say.
[...]
[There] is a culture of corruption and abuse of power in Washington. This is what happens when one party is in charge of everything.

Change! 

The title of this post is provocative and it's meant to be. But it's not a knock on Sarah Palin. I'm still firmly a Palinista, and I hope this post shows you why. Everyone remembers Howard Dean for the "scream" but I think his example provides a context in which Sarah Palin could lose the election, but ultimately win the party and pave the way for a conservative victory in the future more meaningful than McCain-Palin '08 would be.

I'm rooting for Sarah Palin, and in temperament she is nothing like Dean. But she is situated similarly politically, and this is worth exploring further. 

Howard Dean emerged when the Demcoratic Party was in full capitulation mode. Dean was the only semi-sorta-mainsteam candidate who said "no" on Iraq. This in-your-face style galvanized the Democratic base, but party mandarins gasped. Dean couldn't have been more different in style than the "seven dwarves" running against him.

The party elite seemed vindicated when Dean self-destructed. But a little over a year later, Dean was elected DNC Chairman with surprisingly little fuss.

How was this comeback even possible? Whatever Dean's faults, there was a sense that the party elite had bankrupted itself by running a series of poll-tested me-too triangulators. Dean's easy victory at the DNC was the precursor of the grassroots' long-term victory over the elite, culminating in the evisceration of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Does any of this sound familiar?

And who seems to be the flashpoint in this elite-grassroots war currently raging in the GOP? Like Dean, it's Sarah Palin.

Yet, there is a big risk coming up in 15 days. If McCain-Palin loses, and the conventional wisdom hardens that Palin was a big part of the reason for it, the GOP could will learn the wrong lessons from 2008. It will be said that McCain should have picked an uninspiring establishment VP. If we listen to Brooks, Noonan, and Frum, the next time out, the establishment will be emboldened in its natural distrust of happy warrior populists like Palin who bring their own political base to the table. And if the establishment wins this argument, get ready for a 2012 candidate who will be even more incentivized to engage in elite-pleasing, base-enraging behavior on spending, immigration, and stuff like the bailout.

Never mind that many people believe this was precisely the problem with the top of the ticket in 2008. (And the top of the ticket is kind of more relevant to what happens than the bottom half.)

Sarah Palin's legacy as the VP nominee will matter inordinately in defining the Next Right. If the experience is seen as a constructive one (much like Dean), reminding us that it's possible to get regular activists excited about being Republicans again, that Barack Obama ain't the only one who can pack the arenas, and injecting a positive vibe into the GOP at the grassroots level, then I am optimistic about the GOP bouncing back. If instead the lesson of Palin is that we need to pick safe, uninspiring candidates (who will get utterly clobbered by Obama's $1 billion+ re-election campaign, btw) who don't offend Christopher Buckley, then I fear we are in for a long winter indeed. 

Right now, with the small donor and grassroots eruption for Obama, and vibrant progressive institutions that depend on the creativity of an energized base, the Right needs a broad-based movement more than it needs the approval of elites. That means making Palin's brand of politics -- even if she isn't the one who ultimately gets us there -- a permanent fixture in the conservative ecosystem.

Republicans mocked Howard Dean for many years, but this Marc Ambinder post on Ted Stevens indictment should force some reconsideration...

Much of the territory has been hashed out, but his indictment on charges stemming from his alleged lies to federal investigators will almost certainly add a Senate seat to the Democratic column.  It will almost certainly demoralize Republicans in Alaska and excite Democrats. It means that the Obama campaign will put more resources into flipping the state. It means that any senator who got Vecco money -- Norm Coleman? -- will be called to account. 

I am reminded of this story by Matt Bai (also mentioned in his book, The Argument) about Howard Dean spending DNC money (and frustrating Democratic Party insiders) hiring staffers in Alaska...

In paying for two new staffers, Dean had, virtually overnight, doubled the size of Alaska’s beleaguered state party, which used to consist of only an executive director and a part-time fund-raiser. But now, as Dean considered the vastness of the state’s landscape, he decided that one organizer wasn’t enough.

[...]

That night, after meeting with Dean at the sad little storefront office that houses the state party, Alaska’s party chairman, Jake Metcalfe, announced to 400 assembled Democrats at a fund-raiser that Dean had just promised to hire an additional organizer for the state. The ballroom erupted in grateful applause as Dean sat there beaming. The members of his staff, gently rolling their eyes, began calling back to Washington, warning the political staff that they would need to find the money for yet another salary in, of all places, Alaska.

Just two years later, Democrats are competitive in, of all places, Alaska.